Muybridge Meets Occident

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In this era when plus-sized models are increasingly accepted, it must be noted that the world’s first movie star weighed more than 800 pounds. Sacramento-born in 1863, neglected and unschooled in youth, this poor prospect went on to world renown for athletic talent and ability to hit his marks. He was a horse named Charlie.

The horse was purchased at age 5 by a butcher who broke him to harness by harsh treatment. The horse became defiant and was sold in rapid order to a duck hunter and contractor, who worked Charlie hauling dirt in Sacramento’s great project to raise street levels to prevent flooding. Still considered a problem animal, a grocer acquired and lavished gentle attention upon him, completely changing the horse’s personality.

Sydney Eldred, an owner/trainer of racing trotters, spotted Charlie, bought him, and began training him at the state fair racetrack in the area now bounded by 23rd, 20th, E and J streets in midtown. Charlie’s rapid progress was noticed by former Gov. Leland Stanford, who bought him for $4,500, an enormous sum for an unproven horse. Stanford renamed the horse Occident and moved him into his training barn at 17th and F streets. Occident went on to set world records and was the subject of a Currier and Ives print.

In the early 1870s, Stanford engaged prominent San Francisco photographer Eadweard Muybridge to get photographic proof that all four of a horse’s hooves leave the ground at one point in the trot. Stanford selected Occident to be the subject and the Sacramento racetrack as the site for the work.

Experiments at the Sacramento racetrack and then at Stanford’s elaborate Palo Alto horse training facilities (now the site of Stanford University) continued intermittently for years. At the Sacramento racetrack in July 1877 Muybridge finally created a series of single photographs, which were progressively more clear, of the rapidly moving Occident.

Stanford generated ideas as well as money for the endeavor, the cost of which surpassed $42,000. The engineering department of the Central Pacific Railroad designed and fabricated high-speed camera shutters that were claimed to move at 1/5000th of a second. To make photographs appear as silhouettes, white canvas was used as a background to give sharp contrast to the exact hoof positions of Occident.

The project was completed in 1879. The solution: 24 cameras in a line with shutters electrically tripped by the trotting Occident.

The photos were printed in a strip clearly showing each position in the gait, but controversy remained over the photographs and techniques used. Even public demonstrations did not dispel the skeptics. To this day, 24 frames per second is still the standard movie-projection speed.

To find out more about Muybridge and the scandal that nearly derailed the historic shoots as well as his career, turn to page 112.

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